


Eet

by NotQuiteHydePark



Category: She-Hulk, X-Factor (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Dress Up, F/F, F/M, Flirting, Inspired by Music, Little Black Dress, Puns & Word Play, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-19 08:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22007746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHydePark/pseuds/NotQuiteHydePark
Summary: Not exactly a night at the opera.
Relationships: Hank McCoy/ Jennifer Walters, Jean Grey/Ororo Munroe, Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin, Kitty Pryde/Rachel Summers
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10
Collections: 2019 Xplain Yuletide X-Men Fanwork Xchange





	Eet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nausi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausi/gifts).



“Do you ever imagine,” Hank says sleepily, “how we would look if we weren’t heroes and mutants? ‘Seen last night at the Metropolitan Opera: prominent immigration and defense attorney Jennifer Walters, glamorous and statuesque protector of outcasts everywhere from the depredations of The System, arm in arm and ready to greet--“

Under a big pillow, Jennifer jostles Hank’s arm, but of course he won’t stop talking. “Arm in arm with eminent bio-genetic researcher Hank McCoy, as dapper as he is inventive, two-time winner of the Peter Corbeau Prize for Doing Everything, best known for curing—“

“His own meat.” 

Jen kisses him after that quip; she’s trying to make the tease as gentle as possible, because her new boyfriend, as solicitous and playful as he is, can also be slightly self-important. This time he’s game. “Known for curing his own salami. Never let it be said that tonight’s power couple were off their game or the last to the ball, or that they felt anything less than at home among the New York City elite.”

“We’re going to be late,” Jen says, feeling his silk pajamas, then pulling away from him, turning around on the king bed and standing up, so that he sees her musculature from behind, the thin nightgown falling just to her green thighs. They look brighter and rounder and fuller and even stronger against the gray of the rain outside.

“It’s not exactly the opera,” Hank says. He can’t help but comment on that pair of thighs as he sits up in bed beside her. “Sweet.”

“You won’t want to miss the opening act, Hank McCoy. It’s that artist with opera training, the one you told me you really wanted to hear, Majel something?”

“Majel Connery! Indeed, my love, after our discotheque-style brief slumber and pursuant delights, it does seem past time for us to make our way jointly downtown.” Hank bounds up from the bed and leans over to fold, and then pull tight, Jen’s new, crisp, green-on-green-on-green paisley sheet.

“You’re the first guy I’ve ever known,” Jen says, putting on her plait-belted knee-length coat—she never gets cold, but she likes this one—“the first one whose housekeeping is more organized than mine.”

Hank has an answer ready. “That’s not very neat.”

“Touche.” Green hand in furry blue one, the pair head to the elevator, past the front desk, to the sidewalk, to their yellow cab. If Jen were any shorter the muddy water would have splashed over her boots; as it is, the pair have to walk almost almost a foot out into the street.

The rain is intense, like a war in heaven. “Something’s up with this rain,” Jen says. “Can you see straight up?” The cab has a sunroof: Hank finds the switch and unrolls it so both the heroes can see up through the glass. “See the fire up there in the clouds? We can’t do anything about it now, though. Just be sure we’ve got our phones on vibrate, I guess.”

Hank nods, looks around, and twitches his whiskers, assenting, then looks down to the rain spatters on his trousers; he flattens his palm and then moves to fold out a pleat.

Jen remembers when she almost never went to concerts in seated venues. She’s got a weakness for pop-punk, the fourth-wall-breaker of radio-friendly genres, all those happy-sounding, pulse-pounding songs about unrelievable misery. On the other hand, at a seated venue like Nyro Hall she’ll never have to worry about giving someone a concussion if she dances with too much enthusiasm, nor will she have to break up any scrums or catch any crowd-surfers if they fall. Nor will she have to punch anyone who tries to get violent with the rest of the concert-goers. If there’s bad stuff going on in the audience at a concert like this one, at least it’s discreet.

And there’s some very good stuff happening on stage. Hank loves the opening act so much that as soon as the singing stops he starts going on about relative minors and fourths of fifths and major sevenths and Jen smiles at his enthusiasm but that’s a lot of music theory at once: she has to suppress some major giggles when she realizes that he’s speaking to her, twitching his whiskers enthusiastically, sipping a plastic cup of red wine very slowly, and simultaneously writing down ideas about musical composition and pop song forms in a blue notebook, holding a pen in one of his feet.

And then Regina Spektor comes on, and she’s what Jennifer Walters has been waiting for, ever since Patsy played her the first album. That piano! Those dual melody lines! The angst! The resolution! The band’s fine, but Jen loves most the way the rhymes cascade around in her in the solo numbers: she’s focused on her voice, and yet her piano never loses the beat. 

It’s a Christmas show, too, so everything’s red and green, with spotlights like strings of cranberries, and a stage set that looks like a pile of holly. Spiky, yet somehow inviting. Regina stands up to address the audience, then sits back down at the piano, keeping all eyes on her. There’s even a secondary spotlight making red-and-green designs on the one unadorned supporting column near the exit, lovely traces of light across the concrete. 

And yet something’s slightly wrong in the concert hall. Jen notices it before the baseline humans around them can. She almost stands up and then remembers how much of a disruption a visible She-Hulk near the front row of a concert might cause. It’s related somehow to the awful weather outside. “Hank,” she stage-whispers, taking his fingers in hers, “has something changed? Can you feel—“

“Humidity,” Hank says, his ears twitching. “And heat.”

Then, in the middle of “Fidelity,” they both see it. The battle far overhead between what must have been either villains, or elementals, or invaders from some magic dimension, has come through the roof. Rain starts to fall, unevenly, on the heads of the concertgoers, though so far it’s off the stage; the high painted ceiling in the old-style hall is warping and cracking, giving way to an elemental dimension. Scowling orange and grimacing blue creatures are tumbling through it, wrestling each other as they fall with an uncanny slowness through the air.

“I like to defend immigrants whenever I can,” Jen says, “but these guys? They really don’t belong. Let’s toss them out of here as soon as we can so Regina can finish her set. What do the kids say these days when they want something thrown far away, really fast?”

Hank scratches his head with one toe while leaping on the back of a chair to take a look up at their descending antagonists. “Yeet.”

“Got it,” says Jen. “What are those things anyway? Whoops! Coming through.” The sparks one throws have set a curtain on fire, so Jen leaps over the rows and aisles to roll the curtain up in itself, quenching the flames that emanate from the lizardlike creature as it continues to fly through the air and chase its blue counterpart.

“Elemental fire demons,” Hank says. “Efreet.”

“I’m not sure I can fight these guys by throwing heavy objects at them,” Jen says, looking worried for the first time in a while. “And I don’t want to bring down the house like Samson.”

“Maybe it’s the sort of work best undertaken by a professional force of firefighters,” Hank suggests, seeing a curtain still smoldering. One of the blue elementals wrestles one of the orange ones, up in the hole in the sky. Bands of hot and cold ripple across the indoor air; water from the extinguisher system falls through them, steams up and freezes, falls as sleet.

“Firefighters are on their way,” shouts a woman in an usher’s uniform.

“Did you get on the radio to hail them?” asks Hank, proud of his weather pun even as he looks around to see how else he can handle the disturbances. Regina has stopped performing, looking around from the stage, wrapped in her concert dress. Hank wonders if she’s a mutant like Laura Nyro herself.

The usher shakes her head no. “I sent a tweet. ”

But now there’s solid indoor cloud cover up there; there’s a circular gust of wind, and a bit of snow, and the forever-tussling elementals are chastened, departing. “Return to your own domain!” an authoritative contralto booms from the top balcony. “You may pursue your endless war in the corner of Limbo from which you have escaped, but we will enjoy our Christmas concert in peace, and you will no more disturb our meteorology! Go swiftly! Be fleet!”

The elementals gather, as if frightened, into one place-- they were scattered all over the theatre before-- and then a yellow disc descends over them, sucking them all back into their proper space.

“I couldn't have said it better myself,” Hank marvels, and then takes out his opera glasses—yes, Hank brings opera glasses to pop concerts—to see what magic-user spoke those words: he’s surprised to see, all the way up there, no magician at all, but the erstwhile weather-goddess and unlikely pop fan Ororo Munroe, standing regally in a short black gown, with her new short haircut, holding hands with a redhead in a green ski jacket. The two of them kiss.

The redhead’s smiling. She looks very familiar. She’s moving a cup of tea, three pint glasses of red ale, and something with a slice of pineapple in it up the side of the theater, using her telekinesis to avoid the fluting and piping on the walls, as well as the lights, the speakers, the patrons, the emergency exit signs. The elegant carvings on the nineteenth century theater’s interior walls resemble spears, and ferns, and sheaves of wheat.

The cup of tea ends up in Storm’s hand, the pineapple mixed drink in Kate's. Pints of ale go to Illyana, and to Rachel Grey-Summers, and to the redhead herself. 

Of course it’s Jean. “Oh my stars and garters,” Hank says. “Now my evening is complete.”

“I was waiting for you to say that,” says Jen. “What did you see?”

Hank smiles. “You had better take a seat.”

Jen does, as they wait for Regina Spektor to draw her sequined scarf around herself and sit down at the piano, her voice taking over, cascading, compelling, yet playful, for what seems to be an almost—almost!—uninterrupted performance, now that the elementals have been sent away.

“Ororo is on a date with Jean,” Hank says.

“Of course they’re on a date,” Jen says. “They’re dating. Did they not tell you?” 

Hank looks into Jennifer’s rich brown eyes. They’re green and brown at once, like sphagnum peat.

“For all my considerable skill in gathering and managing information,” Hank sighs, “sometimes I feel I am always the last to know.”

Jen squeezes his hand. “Sometimes I like you that way.” And then: “Sue me.”

An hour later they’re filtering out of the concert. The encore was She-Hulk’s favorite song. Jean contacts them both telepathically, and they startle only slightly: Jen’s not used to it. “What a show,” she says. “Want to join the five of us for a late bite?”

“Indubitably,” Hank thinks back at her, “and all gratitude for saving my new favorite singer.” He pauses. "I shall be the only male presence among you; am I interfering with a girls' night out?"

“Not at all,” Ororo thinks back at them. “Let’s eat.”


End file.
